When Paris was forcibly transformed into a modern metropolis during France's Second Empire, the psychic wounds of urbanization yielded some of the most powerful artworks of the 19th century.

Paintings of Paris' absinthe bars and gaslit boulevards that once scandalized the French bourgeoisie are heralded as Impressionist masterpieces, and records of the country's architectural legacy and renovation taken by the Societe Heliographique rank among the highest achievements of photography's first decades. Louis Napoleon and Baron Haussmann's radical urban modernization and its attendant social transformations are at the heart of classic literature by the likes of Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert.

Seen side-by-side with the epic reconfiguration under way in China, however, Paris' mid-siecle makeover seems positively quaint.

"China Urban," a provocative and engaging new show at Reed College's Cooley Gallery, demonstrates how 11 contemporary Chinese artists are responding to the alarming topographical and spiritual reinvention of its city spaces. Filtering the styles and techniques of classical Chinese art through 21st-century strategies, the artists emerge as critical scribes of an ancient culture in flux.

In keeping with its presence in the real world, the Three Gorges Dam project casts a sinister shadow over much of "China Urban." The monolithic power station forced 1.3 million residents to abandon their ancestral villages, and swallowed nearly 250 square miles of land in its reservoir.

Chen Qiulin's gallery document, video cycle and color photographs bear poetic witness to the demolition of her hometown, which was flattened and flooded to make way for the dam. Beginning with "Bei Fu," Qiulin intersperses footage of Wanzhou's destruction with operatic vignettes of costumed characters engaged in their own destructive dramas. Subsequent videos continue this blend of documentary and performance practices, casting the regions' drowning death as the central arc of Qiulin's epic Chinese opera. The artist's most recent video, "Garden," follows two migrant workers as they haul cumbersome vases of artificial peonies by foot on an all-day journey through the dense, hazy city.

However unnatural, their pink floral arrangements are bright explosions of color in the dingy landscape of overpasses and narrow alleyways.

The workers' dreamlike urban passage reappears in a suite of luminescent photographs that find clusters and formations of similarly uniformed men in the cityscape, each bearing vases of the beautiful scentless flowers. Their formal arrangement before the camera echoes Cultural Revolution leader Mao Zedong's insistence on the collective experience, while tenderly revising the Communist tradition of group portraiture.

In early 2008, artists Xie Xiaoze and Chen Zhong visited the 4,000-year-old Sichuan town of Kai Xian as the community made its final preparations for flooding.

Almost entirely vacated and demolished, little remained of the ancient city. Three digital photos in "China Urban" document the artists' haunting installation, titled "Last Days," which was created in the rubble. Working with newspapers from a nearby recycling center, the artists wrapped the city's ruins in its bright newsprint, cloaking freestanding walls and half-fallen structures in a bandaged skein of old news.

In stark contrast to the ghostly desolation of "Last Days," Chen Shaoxiong's video "Ink City" depicts an unspecified Chinese metropolis in more familiar terms, as a newly modernized arena of congestion.

Hundreds of ink drawings detailing anonymous high-rises, gridlocked traffic, hurried pedestrians and freeway overpasses are sequenced into a rapid-fire animation set to a soundtrack of urban cacophony. Rendered in the loose, brushy style of traditional landscape paintings, "Ink City's" vision of the new Chinese landscape is as spiritually hollow as it is claustrophobic.

Li Yan cuts an even more menacing tone in "Snippets 5," his installation of 22 small paintings based on the 2008 Beijing Olympics and their ensuing Tibetan protests. A Beijing resident, the artist's access to independent news, Web sites and other sources of information is controlled by the state, yet he was able to procure images of last summer's violent unrest. The painted depictions of these scenes -- an overturned car, shattered windows, a protester's wounded body -- are executed with an Impressionistic realism that underscores their emotional urgency.

The city serves as a canvas for a different form of political protest in Tsang Tsou-Choi's calligraphic wall drawings.

Known as "the King of Kowloon," Tsang prefigured generations of graffiti artists by tagging the walls of Hong Kong from 1955 until his death in 2007. Tsang asserted that England's 156-year rule of Hong Kong had robbed him of his rightful inheritance. Taking his case to the streets, he covered Hong Kong's walls, lampposts and bridges with tales of his dubious lineage, rendered in bold, blocky calligraphy. Arrested on many occasions and marginalized from polite society, Tsang spent 50 years tattooing the city.

The curators of "China Urban" -- Cooley Gallery director Stephanie Snyder and Reed art historian Lisa Claypool -- working closely with students from Claypool's "Art in Contemporary China course" -- invited Portland calligrapher Dr. Yang Jiyu to re-create the King of Kowloon's graphic text in the gallery, where Tsang's insistent story wraps around the exhibit's entryway and begins to creep into the building's heavily trafficked spaces.

Contemporary Chinese art has suffered no shortage of Western attention in recent years, as evidenced by phenomenal (pre-recession) auction results, flashy museum exhibitions and mountains of glossy press. Rarely, however, is it examined for its substance as rigorously as in "China Urban," vs. being paraded for its stylishness.

Probing beyond the shimmering surfaces of the art world's latest imported fetish commodities, the exhibit shines a light on a new wave of artists creating aesthetic histories in the face of social realities and vanishing traditions.

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